Nobel Winner Unfazed by Backlash
The corner office in Physical Sciences I is adorned with Chinese and Japanese prints, opera festival posters, group pictures of smiling colleagues and, high up on a bookshelf, a curious collection of novelty aerosol cans.
One came from the producers of a B movie called “Day of the Animals,” about creatures run amok because of the atmosphere’s ozone depletion. They invited F. Sherwood “Sherry” Rowland to the premiere, but he declined. He taped the movie when it was on TV, but he can’t bring himself to watch.
The UC Irvine chemistry professor counts that little gift among the stranger souvenirs from his Nobel Prize-winning research that determined that the chlorinated chemicals used in aerosol sprays and car air conditioners were eating a hole in the high-altitude ozone shield that protects the Earth against the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.
These keepsakes, which include another gift, a miniature bust of MAD magazine’s goofy Alfred E. (“What me worry?”) Neuman, capture the wit and sarcasm of a man who made no apologies for his controversial research and makes none now as he eschews retirement and a cloistered laboratory for the high-flying life of the science star.
Two years after he, colleague Mario Molina (now at MIT) and Dutch chemist Paul Krutzen shared a Nobel prize in chemistry, Rowland doesn’t spend much time in his standard-issue office or in the lab, for that matter.
Between frequent speaking engagements--he gets an invitation to speak overseas every 10 days or so--and his duties as foreign secretary for the National Academy of Sciences, an advisory body to the president, Rowland is a 180,000-mile-a-year flier, sometimes hitting four countries in a single month.
As a Nobel laureate, he speaks from a lofty perch, but worries that a society capable of both exaggerated concerns about science (“Day of the Animals”) and a cavalier attitude toward it (Alfred E. Neuman) doesn’t always listen. Lately, despite overwhelming scientific acceptance of his work, he has faced a backlash from both the scientific and the political fringes.
But Rowland, 70, rises to his own defense. There he was in July, telling President Clinton point-blank: “The climate is changing, and the evidence for that is very clear-cut. The temperature of the Earth is going up.”
And Rowland handed him a statement to that effect, signed by 2,600 scientists, to emphasize the point as the administration decides how far the United States should go in setting limits for carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle exhaust, coal-burning factories and other sources. Industry has opposed stringent limits, fearing that high gasoline prices and other measures would disrupt the economy.
Because he is off-campus so often, he doesn’t teach undergraduates and is not teaching graduate students this semester. He is not a hands-on researcher, either, joking that his lab assistants won’t let him touch the equipment for fear he might screw things up. He leaves the details to about 20 faculty, students and others in the Rowland-Blake Research Group, with UC Irvine chemist Donald R. Blake handling the day-to-day work.
*
These days he sees himself more as a coach: “You don’t let [Tommy] Lasorda pitch, but you do take his advice.”
Lately, the research has looked at high smog levels in what was thought to be pristine air near Fiji, and the effects of commercial airliner exhaust on the atmosphere.
Down the hall from his office, a graduate student is preparing boxes carrying 24 air canisters that will be loaded on a NASA DC-8 to collect samples from the air corridors over the North Atlantic. Rowland’s research group will fly along with other participants to study the quality of the air in the atmosphere trafficked by commercial airliners.
The science drives him, he says, but should the experiments produce alarming results, Rowland might again step in front of the TV cameras. In 1974, the year his first paper on the subject was published, he did just that, bucking scientific tradition to push for the banning of chlorofluorocarbons.
“There are probably people who haven’t changed their view that scientists should stay in their place,” Rowland said. But “I don’t think that means giving up your citizenship rights.
“It never has made sense to me that, when there is something which is of public interest and public discussion, that the scientists who actually understand the problem and know something about it should stay in their laboratories and let the lobbyists, who don’t know anything about it, argue about it. That seems to me to be the wrong way to run society.”
Outspoken though he is, he doesn’t believe he crosses the line into politics. And he neither accepts nor rejects the label “environmentalist.”
“If you draw a line from, let’s say, the extreme environmentalists--the tree-huggers--and the extreme industrialists--who would be the midnight dumpers--I’m closer to a tree hugger than I am to a midnight dumper,” he said.
“I got into this not as an environmentalist but as a scientist interested in studying the chemistry of the atmosphere. In that particular sense I did not come out of what is usually labeled as the environmental community, I came out of the scientific community studying a scientific problem.”
Those close to Rowland believe that, after years of withering criticism from the $2-billion CFC industry before the ban was enacted, the Nobel--along with “smoking gun” discoveries of ozone holes over the Antarctic and parts of the northern hemisphere--brought him vindication.
“I think he feels more relaxed and good to have his work ratified by this world-class organization,” said Ralph Cicerone, dean of UC Irvine’s School of Physical Sciences and a fellow atmospheric chemist. “This is not just a group of old men and women in Sweden. They rely on people around the world to give independent reports and assessments and criticism.”
Yet Rowland does not gloat. He worries.
*
The backlash against global warming evidence nags at him, even as it speaks from the scientific fringe. A vast majority of scientists accept that CFCs deplete the ozone, and that the average temperature of the planet has risen at least 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last century.
S. Fred Singer, a Virginia physicist who has not done direct research on ozone depletion, is one of Rowland’s more ardent critics and has been cited by the likes of radio personality Rush Limbaugh and a few lawmakers to denounce the prevailing view on ozone depletion.
Singer’s group, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, suggests that other particles could be responsible, and at any rate the dangers of the phenomenon are overblown.
“The world could do without CFCs in the long run,” said Singer, who intends to present a paper challenging Rowland’s conclusions at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “But I object to the fact we are phasing them out so suddenly and precipitously without scientific justification.”
To Rowland, such theorists are worthy of membership in the Flat Earth Society.
